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#1 Laptops with SSD

Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2022 10:44 am
by pre65
I'm looking to get Jean and myself a more modern, and faster CPU laptop.

If a laptop comes with a SSD, and a slot for a conventional hard drive, what happens if I fit a conventional hard drive that also has a copy of W10 built in ?

Would the laptop automatically boot up and get W10 running from the SSD ?

When installing W10 updates would they update just the SSD, and not the conventional hard drive ?

I was intending to swap the (fairly new) hard drives from our current laptops.

#2 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2022 11:13 am
by Ant
You would have to tell it to boot from the hdd
If it already has an ssd and has an os on it already why the extra drive?
If it is simply for extra storage and has an os already on the ssd id leave it alone in terms of booting and then format the extra drive which it should configure as d:/

I just bought a 2 year old hp laptop for my daughter to use and that has an ssd, it boots very quickly and is alot faster accessing the drive than ive experienced with normal hdd

#3 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2022 11:27 am
by pre65
Re using her existing hard drive is simply to keep everything she has saved up till now.

#4 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2022 11:42 am
by Nick
Re using her existing hard drive is simply to keep everything she has saved up till now.
In that case you don't want or need it to boot from there just use it as an extra drive.

#5 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2022 11:44 am
by Nick
But personally, if its just old data that you want, I would just get a drive caddy and mount the old drive externally and copy stuff over. You can then use the old drive to store backups from the laptop.

#6 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2022 11:56 am
by Ant
A caddy should be about 7 quid for it, i did that with an old 1tb laptop hdd and used it as external storage for the kids games. just make sure you check what type of drive it is as there are different connectors for the drives, sata pcie and ide are the ones i can remember

#7 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2022 12:04 pm
by pre65
I've got (somewhere) a USB caddy with it's own power supply.

Don't use it very often but it's a handy thing to have. It's got SATA and the older style (PATA ?) connections and it's 3.5" style but can take 2.5" drives.

#8 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2022 3:14 pm
by lindsayt
What will you be using the laptop for? If it's just for web stuff, watching videos, video conferencing, word processing, simple spreadsheets, email, general home use -
You can buy great 13" and 14" premium business laptops off ebay for less than £200.
Dell latitude 7390's and 7490's.

They will come with a Windows 10 licence built into the motherboard.
Buy or borrow a USB stick (or usb hard drive) for putting a fresh Windows 10 or 11 install on whatever laptop you buy. Or install Linux.

Use the USB stick to copy over your data, including your interent favourites and saved passwords.

If you've got loads of data on your old laptop, you may need to upgrade the SSD on the new laptop. Fast 500GB SSD's cost about £55.

If you get the new laptop in the next 2 weeks, feel free to bring your laptops to Owston and I'll be to stick a build on them and do data migration.

And BTW for general home use the CPU make's F' all diference to the speed. I'm typing this on a 12 year old laptop with a 1st Gen Intel i5 CPU. It's lightning fast for my needs. Because I fitted an SSD. It's possible that your existing laptop would be speeded up to lightning fast response times, just by fitting an SSD.

#9 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2022 3:48 pm
by pre65
lindsayt wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 3:14 pm
And BTW for general home use the CPU make's F' all diference to the speed. I'm typing this on a 12 year old laptop with a 1st Gen Intel i5 CPU. It's lightning fast for my needs. Because I fitted an SSD. It's possible that your existing laptop would be speeded up to lightning fast response times, just by fitting an SSD.
Thanks for the advice.

Looks like a SSD might be what is really needed.

#10 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2022 6:26 pm
by lindsayt
It's likely that an SSD is all that is needed. If you're happy with the old laptop, apart from the speed. And you're not doing anything extraordinary on it, such as editing 4k videos with lots of added effects. Or playing Cyberpunk 2077 at maximum graphic settings.

Then it's a case of getting the right sort of SSD for your laptop and doing a proper migration from the old hard drive to the new.

#11 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2022 7:21 pm
by izzy wizzy
2nd'd. Did same to our old i3 lappys and they are reborn and speedy for little money.

#12 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2022 10:36 pm
by simon
3rded. Our laptop is over 13 years old and only has 3GB of RAM but putting a SSD in it rejuvenated it. It is getting a bit slow now but we've had another 6 years or so out of it.

#13 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 10:03 am
by brig001
Fourthded. Use Samsung SSDs and their cloning software just works

#14 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 11:52 am
by andrew Ivimey
Fifth'd.... the first time I did this my heart was in my mouth. SSD from ebay with Windows 10 pre installed.

It all went as it should and bingo! -ancient laptop boots up in a few seconds; never a moment's trouble since -WOW.

#15 Re: Laptops with SSD

Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2022 3:11 pm
by pre65
I've just ordered (from Ebuyer) a Crucial MX500-500gb 2.5" SSD hard drive, with 9mm adaptor.

It should be here Saturday, and looking forward to getting it installed.

If it goes well, I'll get another one for Jeans laptop. :)